Man and Boy

by Tony Parsons

  “I’ll get your mother.”

  He was gruff and formal on the phone, as if he had never got used to using one. As if we had never met. As if I was trying to sell him something he didn’t want.

  “Dad? Did you see the show last night?”

  I knew he had seen it. They always watched my show.

  There was a pause.

  “Quite a performance,” my father said.

  I knew he would have hated it all—the swearing, the violence, the politics. I could even hear him bitching about the commercials. But I wanted him to tell me that it didn’t matter. That I was forgiven.

  “That’s live television, Dad,” I said with a forced laugh. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

  The old man grunted.

  “It’s not really my scene,” he said.

  At some point in the nineties, my father had started using the vernacular of the sixties.

  His speech was peppered with “no ways” and “not my scenes.” No doubt in another thirty years he would be collecting his pension and hobbling about in a walker while proclaiming that he was “cool.” But by then the world wouldn’t know what he was going on about.

  “Anyway,” I said. “There’s no need to worry. Everything’s under control.”

  “Worried? I’m not worried,” he said.

  The silence hummed between us. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap between our separate worlds. I didn’t know where to start.

  “I’ll get your mother.”

  While he went to get my mom, Pat wandered into the room. He was in his pajamas, his mass of dirty yellow hair sticking up, those eyes from Tiffany still puffy with sleep. I held out my arms to him, realizing with a stab of pain how much I loved him. He walked straight past me and over to the video machine.

  “Pat? Come here, darling.”

  He reluctantly came over to me, clutching a tape of Return of the Jedi. I pulled him onto my lap. He had that sweet, musty smell that kids have when they have just got up. He yawned wide as I kissed him on the cheek. His skin was brand new. Freshly minted. The softest thing in the world.

  And he still looked like the most beautiful thing in the world to me, like a little blond angel who had dropped off a cloud on his way to the celestial video shop.

  Was he really that pretty? Or was that just my parental gene kicking in? Does every child in the world look like that to his parent? I still don’t know.

  “Did you have a nice time at Nanny and Granddad’s house?” I said.

  He thought about it for a moment.

  “They don’t have any good films,” he said.

  “What kind of films do they have?”

  “Stupid ones. Just with…pictures.”

  “You mean cartoons?”

  “Yeah. Just pictures. For babies.”

  I was indignant.

  “Pat, they’re not for babies. You don’t like Dumbo? The elephant with the big ears? The poor little elephant who everyone makes fun of?”

  “Dumbo’s stupid.”

  “Dumbo’s great! What’s wrong with Dumbo? Jesus Christ, I grew up with Dumbo!”

  I was going to give him a lecture about the genius of Walt Disney and the glory of animation and the magic of childhood, but my mom came on the line.

  “Harry? We were so worried. What on earth’s going to happen? Will you lose your job?”

  “Mom, I’m not going to lose my job. What happened last night—that’s what we call good television.”

  “Really, dear? I thought you once told me that it was good television if the guest attacked the host. I didn’t know it worked the other way ’round.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said, although she had a point. All the talk show punch-ups I could remember involved the presenter getting twatted. And not the other way around. “They’re giving me a new contract soon. Don’t worry, Mom—we don’t have to send Pat up a chimney just yet.”

  “And what’s wrong with Gina? She seems so—I don’t know—down.”

  “Gina’s fine,” I said. “What’s Gina got to be down about?”

  After I’d hung up, Pat beetled over to the video machine and stuffed in Return of the Jedi. The film began where he had left it—Princess Leia dressed as a slave girl at the feet of Jabba the Hutt. Drool slipped from Jabba’s filthy lips as he considered his nubile concubine. My four-year-old son watched the scene impassively. This couldn’t be good for him, could it?

  “Why don’t we have a game?” I suggested.

  His face brightened.

  “Okay!”

  “What do you want to play?”

  “Star Wars.”

  Grinning from ear to ear, he hauled his favorite toy box in from his bedroom and emptied its contents on the carpet. Out spilled all the things that made George Lucas famous. I sat on the floor with Pat while he carefully maneuvered Han, Luke, Chewie, and the two ’droids around his gray plastic Millennium Falcon.

  “Princess Leia is being held captured on the Death Star,” Pat said.

  “Captive,” I said. “She’s being held captive.”

  “Being held captured,” he said. “We have to rescue her, Daddy.”

  “Okay.”

  I sat playing with my son for a while, something I knew I didn’t do nearly enough. Then after about five or ten minutes I decided I had better get in to work. It was going to be a long day.

  Pat was disappointed that I was cutting our game short, but he cheered up when I switched his video of Princess Leia as a beautiful slave girl back on. He really liked that bit.

  ***

  We were all over the papers.

  They saw the Cliff incident as symptomatic of a medium in terminal decline, desperate for cheap sensation in a world of visual overload and limited attention spans. The tabloids were going crazy about the blood and bad language.

  All of them were calling for the head of Marty Mann. I was going to call him from the car, but I remembered that I had lent Gina my mobile phone. I hate those things.

  Marty’s company—Mad Mann Productions—had a floor in a building on Notting Hill Gate, a large open-plan office where self-consciously casual young people in their twenties worked on The Marty Mann Show or spent months planning future Marty Mann projects. The office was currently working on a game show for clever people, an alternative travel program, a scuba diving series that would allow Marty to spend six months in the Maldives, and lots of other ideas that would almost certainly never actually happen.

  We called it development. The outside world would call it farting around.

  Only me and Marty had offices at Mad Mann. Actually they were more like little private cubby holes, full of tapes and shooting scripts and a few VCRs. Siobhan was waiting for me in mine.

  She had never been in my room before. We sort of blushed at each other. Why is it so easy to talk to someone before you go to bed with them for the first time and then suddenly so difficult?

  “You should have woken me up before you left,” she said.

  “I was going to,” I said. “But you looked so…”

  “Peaceful?”

  “Knackered.”

  She laughed. “Well, it was a bad night. The only good thing about it was you.”

  “Listen, Siobhan—”

  “It’s okay, Harry. I know. I’m not going to see you again, am I? Not like last night, I mean. You don’t have to pretend. You don’t have to say anything that isn’t true. I know you’re married.”

  “You’re a great girl, Siobhan. You really are.”

  And I meant it.

  “But you love your wife. I know, I know. Don’t worry. I would prefer to hear it now than six months down the line. I would rather get it over with before I really start to like you. At least you’re not like some of them. You didn
’t tell me that your wife doesn’t understand you. You didn’t tell me that you’re probably going to break up. You didn’t spend months sneaking out of the house to phone me. You’re not a stinking hypocrite.”

  Not a hypocrite? I spent last night with you and I’ll spend tonight with my wife. Surely a hypocrite is exactly what I am.

  “You’re no good at all this, Harry. That’s what I like about you. Believe me, there are not many around like you. I know. The last one—Jesus. I really thought he was going to leave his wife and we were actually going to get married. That’s how stupid I am.”

  “You’re not stupid,” I said, putting my arms around her. We held each other tight, with real feeling. Now that we were splitting up we were getting on brilliantly.

  Then she started to get choked up about how difficult it is to find a good man while I thought to myself—well, that’s a relief. We aren’t going to star in a remake of Fatal Attraction after all.

  I knew I was getting off lightly. Siobhan was going to let me go without pouring acid on my MGF or putting our pet rabbit in a pot. Not that we had a rabbit. But after the relief had subsided I was surprised to find that I felt a little hurt. Was it so easy to say good-bye to me?

  “This always happens to me,” Siobhan laughed, although her eyes were all wet and shining. “I always pick the ones that have already been picked. Your wife is a lucky woman. As I believe I said on that message I left you.”

  “What message?”

  “The message on your cell phone.”

  “My cell phone?”

  “I left a message on your phone,” Siobhan said, drying her eyes with the back of her hand. “Didn’t you get it?”

  seven

  Gina was packing her bags when I got home. Stuffing a suitcase and a weekend bag up in our bedroom, pale-faced and dry-eyed, doing it as quickly as she could, taking only the bare essentials. As if she couldn’t stand to be here anymore.

  “Gina?”

  She turned and looked at me, and it was as if she was seeing me for the very first time. She seemed almost giddy with contempt and sadness and anger. Especially anger. It scared the shit out of me. She had never looked at me like that before.

  She turned again, picking up something from the little table by her side of the bed. An ashtray. No, not an ashtray. We didn’t have any ashtrays. She threw my phone at me.

  She had always been a lousy shot—and we had had one or two arguments where things had been thrown—but there wasn’t the room to miss and it smacked hard against my chest. I picked it up off the floor and a bone just above my heart began to throb.

  “I’ll never forgive you for this,” she said. “Never.” She nodded at the phone. “Why don’t you listen to your messages?”

  I pressed the icon on the phone showing a little envelope. Siobhan’s voice came crackling through, wry and sleepy and completely out of place in our bedroom.

  “It’s always a bad sign if they go before you wake up…but please don’t feel bad about last night…because I don’t…your wife is a lucky woman…and I’m looking forward to working with you…’bye, Harry.”

  “Did you sleep with this girl, Harry?” Gina said, then shook her head. “What’s wrong with me? Why am I even bothering to ask? Because I want you to tell me that it isn’t true. But of course it’s true.”

  I tried to put my arms around her. Not hugging her. Just trying to hold on to her. Trying to calm her down. To stop her getting away. To stop her from leaving me. She shook me off, almost snarling.

  “Some little slut at the office, is she?” Gina said, still throwing clothes into her suitcase. She wasn’t even looking at the clothes she was packing. She didn’t look as though she thought she was a lucky woman. “Some little slut who thinks you can do her a few favors.”

  “She’s actually a really nice girl. You’d like her.”

  It was a stupid thing to say. I knew it the second the words left my big mouth, but by then it was already too late. Gina came across the bedroom and slapped me hard across the face. I saw her wince with pain, her eyes suddenly brimming with tears. She didn’t really know how to hit someone. Gina wasn’t like that.

  “You think it was romantic or passionate or some such bullshit,” Gina said. “But it’s none of those things. It’s just grubby and sordid and pathetic. Really pathetic. Do you love her?”

  “What?”

  “Are you in love with this girl?”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “If she wants my life, she can have it. All of it. Including you. Especially you, Harry. Because it’s all a lie.”

  “Please, Gina. It was a mistake. A terrible mistake, okay?” I scrambled for words. “It didn’t mean a thing,” I told her.

  She started laughing and crying at the same time. “Don’t you understand that makes it worse?” she said. “Don’t you understand anything at all?”

  Then she started to really sob, her shoulders all hunched up and shaking, not even trying to wipe away tears that seemed to start somewhere deep inside her chest. I wanted to put my arms around her. But I didn’t dare touch her.

  “You’re just like my father,” she said, and I knew it was the worst thing in the world that she could ever say. “Just like him.”

  “Please, Gina,” I said. “Please.”

  She shook her head, as if she could no longer understand me, as if I had stopped making any kind of sense.

  “What, Harry? Please? What? You’re like a fucking parrot. Please what?”

  “Please,” I said parrotlike. “Please don’t stop loving me.”

  “But you must have known,” she said, slamming shut the suitcase, most of her clothes still unpacked and scattered all over our bed. The other bag was already full. She was almost ready to leave. She was nearly there now. “You must have known that this is the one thing that I could never forgive,” she said. “You must have known that I can’t love a man who doesn’t love me—and only me. And if you didn’t know that, Harry, then you don’t know me at all.”

  I once read somewhere that, in any relationship, the one who cares the least is the one with all the power.

  Gina had all the power now. Because she didn’t care at all anymore.

  I followed her as she dragged her suitcase and bag out into the hall and across to Pat’s bedroom. He was carefully placing Star Wars figures into a little Postman Pat backpack. He smiled up at us.

  “Look what I’m doing,” he said.

  “Are you ready, Pat?” Gina asked.

  “Nearly,” he said.

  “Then let’s go,” she said, wiping away the tears with her sleeve.

  “Okay,” Pat said. “Guess what?” He was looking at me now, his beautiful face illuminated by a smile. “We’re going on a holiday.”

  I let them get as far as the door and then I realized that I couldn’t stand losing them. I just couldn’t stand it. I grabbed the handle of Gina’s bag.

  “Where are you going? Just tell me where you’re going.”

  She tugged at the bag, but I refused to let go. So she just left me holding it as she opened the front door and stepped across the threshold.

  I followed them out into the street, still holding Gina’s bag, and watched her strap Pat into his child seat. He had sensed that something was very wrong. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Suddenly I realized that he was my last chance.

  “What about, Pat?” I said. “Aren’t you going to think about him?”

  “Did you?” she said. “Did you think about him, Harry?”

  She heaved her suitcase into the back of the station wagon, not bothering to get the other bag back from me. She let me keep it.

  “Where will you stay?”

  “Good-bye, Harry.”

  And then she left me. Pat’s face was small and anxious in the backseat. Gina stared straight ahead, her eyes hard and shi
ning. She already looked like someone else. Someone I didn’t know. She turned on the ignition.

  I watched the car until it turned the bend in the street where we lived, and only then was I aware of the curtains that were twitching with curiosity. The neighbors were watching us. With a sinking feeling, I realized that’s the kind of couple we had become.

  I carried Gina’s bag back into the house where the phone was ringing. It was Marty.

  “Can you believe what these fuckers are saying about me in the papers?” he said. “Look at this one—BAN MAD MANN FROM OUR TELLY. And this one—A MANN OF FEW WORDS—ALL OF THEM ****ING OBSCENE. What the fuck are they implying? These people want my job, Harry. My mom is really upset. What are we going to do?”

  “Marty,” I said. “Gina’s left me.”

  “She’s left you? You mean she’s walked out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about the kid?”

  “She’s taken Pat with her.”

  “Has she got someone else?”

  “Nothing like that. It was me. I did something stupid.”

  Marty chuckled in my ear. “Harry, you dirty dog. Anyone I know?”

  “I’m frightened, Marty. I think she might be gone for good.”

  “Don’t worry, Harry. The most she can get is half of everything you own.”

  He was wrong there. Gina had already walked out with everything that I had ever wanted. She had got the lot.

  eight

  Barry Twist worked for the station. Over the last year, I had been to dinner at his home and he had come to dinner at mine. But, the way our world worked, we weren’t exactly friends. I couldn’t tell him about Gina. It felt like I knew a lot of people like that.

  Barry had been the first of the television people to take Marty and me out to lunch when we were doing the radio show. He had thought the show would work on TV and, more than anyone, he had been responsible for putting us there. Barry had smiled all the way through that first lunch, smiled as though it was an honor to be on the same planet as Marty and me. But he wasn’t smiling now.

  “You’re not a couple of kids dicking about on the radio anymore,” he said. “These are big boys’ rules.” His conversation was full of stuff like “big boys’ rules,” as though working in television was a lot like running an undercover SAS unit in South Armargh. “We had nine hundred phone calls complaining about the fucking language.”